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I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths. By Alain De Botton God Exist Wavered Certainty Fathers

Because we inhibit the same material world and manoeuvre with languages tied to common definitions, we talk to others in the assumption that they largely share our images and conceptions. By Alain De Botton Definitions Conceptions Inhibit Material World

It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life?Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ? By Alain De Botton Decency Indecency Idea Statusideal Wealth

The sulker is a complicated creature, giving off messages of deep ambivalence, crying out for help and attention, while at the same time rejecting it should it be offered, wanting to be understood without needing to speak. By Alain De Botton Creature Giving Ambivalence Crying Attention

There is only one person to whom we can expose our catalogue of grievances, one person who can be the recipient of all our accumulated rage at the injustices and imperfections of our lives. It is of course the height of absurdity to blame them. But this is to misunderstand the rules under which love operates. It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate us for blaming them. We take it out on the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in the vicinity, the ones least likely to have harmed us, but the ones most likely to stick around while we pitilessly rant at them. The By Alain De Botton Person Grievances Lives Expose Catalogue

The true aspiration of art should be to reduce the need for it. It is not that we should one day lose our devotion to the things that art addresses: beauty, depth of meaning, good relationships, the appreciation of nature, recognition of the shortness of life, empathy, compassion, and so on. Rather, having imbibed the ideals that art displays, we should fight to attain in reality the things art merely symbolises, however graciously and intently. The ultimate goal of the art lover should be to build a world where works of art have become a little less necessary By Alain De Botton Art True Aspiration Reduce Things

Pain is surprising; we cannot understand why we have been abandoned in love ... why we are unable to sleep at night ... Identifying reasons for such discomforts does not spectacularly absolve us of pain, but it may form the principal basis of a recovery. While assuring us that we are not uniquely cursed, understanding grants us a sense of the boundaries to, and bitter logic behind, our suffering. 'Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.' - Proust By Alain De Botton Surprising Love Understand Abandoned Pain

It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other's imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes - hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more. My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways - and that's okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we're all these incredibly fragile beings. By Alain De Botton Shocks Frightens Concerned Imagination Love

Why is this painful journey so indispensable to the acquisition of true wisdom? ... It is as if the mind were a squeamish organ that refused to entertain difficult truths unless encouraged to do so by difficult events. "Happiness is good for the body," Proust tells us, "but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind." These griefs put us through a form of mental gymnastics which we would have avoided in happier times. Indeed, if a genuine priority is the development of our mental capacities, the implication is that we would be better off being unhappy than content, better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza. (Proust writes) A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and more vital than does a man of genius who interests us. By Alain De Botton Wisdom Proust Painful Journey Indispensable

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. By Alain De Botton Poems Books Paintings Acknowledge Give

The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its oppositie can acquire an apparently haphazard connection to results. The succesful alpinist of organizational pyramids may not be the best at their jobs, but those who have best mastered a range of dark political arts in which civilized life does not usually offer instruction. By Alain De Botton Uncertainty Employment Dynamics Travails Include

Ruskin's interest in beauty and in its possession led him to five central conclusions. First, beauty was the result of a number of complex factors that affected the mind both psychologically and visually. Second, humans had an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Third, there were many lower expressions of this desire for possession (including, as we have seen, buying souvenirs and carpets, carving one's name on a pillar and taking photographs). Fourth, there was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it. And last, the most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding was by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so. By Alain De Botton Beauty Ruskin Conclusions Interest Led

What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the explanations for it. It may be frightening to hear that a high proportion of a community holds us to be wrong, but before abandoning our position, we should consider the method by which their conclusions have been reached. It is the soundness of their method of thinking that should determine the weight we give to their disapproval. We seem afflicted by the opposite tendency: to listen to everyone, to be upset by every unkind word and sarcastic observation. We fail to ask ourselves the cardinal and most consoling question: on what basis has this dark censure been made? We treat with equal seriousness the objections of the critic who has thought rigorously and honestly and those of the critic who has acted out of misanthropy and envy. By Alain De Botton Worry Number People Oppose Good

For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations ... Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle. By Alain De Botton History Actualised Organisations Rest Bright

The new pornography would combine sexual excitement with an interest in other human ideals. The usual animalistic categories and hackneyed plots, replete with stock characters seemingly incapable of coherent speech, would give way to pornographic images and scenarios based aorund such qualities as intelligence (showing people reading or wandering the stacks in libraries), kindness (people performing oral sex on one another with an air of sweetness and regard) or humility (people caught looking embarrassed, shy or self-conscious). By Alain De Botton Ideals People Pornography Combine Sexual

The word power typically signifies a capacity for action. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us power lies in an 'ability to do or effect something or anything, or to act upon a person or thing'. The person who has power may influence the material or social environment, generally on the basis of possessing high-tech weapons, money, oil, superior intelligence or large muscles. In war, I am powerful because I can blow up your city walls or drop bombs on your airfields. In the financial world, I am powerful because I can buy up your shares and invade your markets. In boxing, I am ,ore powerful because my punches outwit and exhaust yours. But in love, this issue appears to depend on a far more passive, negative definition; instead of looking at power as a capacity to do something, one may come to think of it as the capacity to do nothing. By Alain De Botton Power Powerful Capacity Action Word

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. This isn't necessarily our fault as individuals. Society as a whole appears determined to render the single state as nettlesome and depressing as possible: once the freewheeling days of school and university are over, company and warmth become dispiritingly hard to find; social life starts to revolve oppressively around couples; there's no one left to call or hang out with. It's hardly surprising, then, if when we find someone halfway decent, we might cling. By Alain De Botton Extent Shameful Charm Marriage Boils

What ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our name. By Alain De Botton Ease Seemingly Entrenched Lives Altered

How pleasant to hold in mind, through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere. By Alain De Botton Mind Moods Threaten Pleasant Hold

I am the soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man. By Alain De Botton Lives Man Soul Brother Giraffe

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe. By Alain De Botton Born Hippopotamus Make Giraffe Man

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life. By Alain De Botton Lessons Assumption Navigated Life Intuitively

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love. By Alain De Botton Love Sad Books Console Lonely

Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives. By Alain De Botton People Inquiries Answers Lives Suspect

I can't understand people who don't like chocolate. I was once going out with aguy, this guy Robert I was telling you about, and I was never reallycomfortable with him, but I couldn't work out why. Then one day it all becameclear: he didn't like chocolate. I mean he didn't just not love it, this guyactually hated it. You could have put a bar in front of him and he wouldn'thave touched it. That kind of thinking is so far removed from anything I canrelate to, you know. Well, after that, you can imagine, it was clear we had tobreak up. By Alain De Botton Chocolate Understand People Robert Aguy

The very concept of trying to 'teach' a lover things feels patronising, incongruous and plain sinister. If we truly loved someone, there could be no talk of wanting him or her to change. Romanticism is clear on this score: true love should involve an acceptance of a partner's whole being. It is this fundamental commitment to benevolence that makes the early months of love so moving. Within the new relationship, our vulnerabilities are treated with generosity. Our shyness, awkwardness and confusion endear (as they did when we were children) rather than generate sarcasm or complain; the trickier sides of us are interpreted solely through the filter of compassion. From these moments, a beautiful yet challenging, and even reckless, conviction develops: that to be properly loved must always mean being endorsed for all that one is. By Alain De Botton Teach Patronising Incongruous Sinister Concept

You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol. By Alain De Botton Alcohol Long Hard Day Work

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to ... How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an objectwhether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jugand see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see. By Alain De Botton Correlatives Exertions Generally Find Enduring

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too. By Alain De Botton Love Story Stories Quest Adult

We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or 'human flourishing'. By Alain De Botton Greek Travel Trivial Eudaimonia Human

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious onethat we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life. By Alain De Botton Childlike Christianity Differ Thesis Precious

a lack of love:between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself. By Alain De Botton Love Organized Unhappy Wanting Lack

What does it mean that man is a 'social animal? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that molluscs or earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around to show us what we're like. 'A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,' wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbours. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves. By Alain De Botton Social Animal Man Character Stendhal

The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live. By Alain De Botton Live Memory Heavenly Inability Present

Nature puts us all in our places. Being made to feel small isn't something we welcome when it's done to us by another person, but to be apprised of our essential nothingness by something so much greater than ourselves is in no sense humiliating. Our egos, exhaustingly aware of every slight they receive and prone relentlessly to compare their advantages with those enjoyed by others, may even be relieved to find themselves finally humbled by forces so much more powerful than any human being could ever muster. By Alain De Botton Nature Places Puts Person Humiliating

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. By Alain De Botton Sublime Viciously Places Repeat Grand

There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction. Someone By Alain De Botton Unhappiness Things Humans Dedicated Reason

Silence and clumsiness could of course be taken as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant. By Alain De Botton Silence Desire Clumsiness Pitiful Proof

Differences of age or of race may set up postitions of manufactured superiority: the manual worker from Germany flies to Thailand and because of the historical advantage of his economy and exchange rate, feels and behaves like a millionaire. The plodding Englishman arrives in a small North American town and, simply on account of his exotic accent, may be welcomed as charmingly original and sophisticated. By Alain De Botton Germany Thailand Differences Superiority Rate

A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste will not necessarily change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don't like with simple disparagement By Alain De Botton Beautiful Disparagement Grasp Psychological Mechanism

We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane. By Alain De Botton Good Relationships Areas Insane Constantly

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of artnovels, poems, plays, paintings or filmscan function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world. By Alain De Botton Ife Criticism Creatures Gods Desirous

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement. By Alain De Botton Achievement Mature Affection Begin Depend

The truth of the maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity. By Alain De Botton Complexity Truth Maxim Beauty Lies

Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love. By Alain De Botton Buyers Rewarding Displays Teasing Blame

Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine. By Alain De Botton Love Imagine Induce Burden Propagating

A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray.Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present. By Alain De Botton Maddening Storyteller Provided Profusion Details

In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts. By Alain De Botton Water Oasis Trees Belief Complex

The most fulfilling human projects appeared inseparable from a degree of torment, the sources of our greatest joys lying awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains ... Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfillment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable. By Alain De Botton Greatest Torment Fulfilling Human Projects

The great fortunes of our day have rarely been accumulated through the sale of the most meaningful items and services, such as poetry or relationship counselling. By Alain De Botton Services Counselling Great Fortunes Day

At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing throughand which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families. By Alain De Botton Site Overlooking Motorway Cargo Top

Even if our loved ones have assured us that they'll be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special. By Alain De Botton June Work Place Ago Special

We place such demands on our partners, and become so unreasonable around them, because we have faith that someone who understands obscure parts of us, whose presence solves so many of our woes, must somehow also be able to fix everything about our lives. We exaggerate the other's powers in a curious sort of homage - heard in adult life decades down the line - to a small child's awe at their own parents' apparently miraculous capacities. To By Alain De Botton Partners Woes Lives Place Demands

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity. (p 207) By Alain De Botton Literature Ideas Admire Prose Small

The real risk is that we will fall into depression and despair; the danger is that we will lose hope in the human project. It is this kind of despondency that art is uniquely well suited to correct. Flowers in spring, blue skies, children running on the beach ... these are the visual symbols of hope. By Alain De Botton Despair Project Real Risk Fall

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope! By Alain De Botton Important Task Determined Optimism Outcomes

People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled upon and their singularities ignored. By Alain De Botton Somebodies Nobodies People Labelled Inverse

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes - for a while, at least - be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, By Alain De Botton Essence Characters Makes People Ability

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough. By Alain De Botton Category People Miss Allowing Weird

Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love; its foundations are shared with its opposite. The woman seduced by her partner's way of kissing her neck, turning the pages of a book, or telling a joke watches irritation collect at precisely these junctures. It is as if the end of love is already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love's collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation. By Alain De Botton Love Hate Opposite Hidden Script

Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard. During By Alain De Botton Crucial Night Heard Insights Convey

The kinds of purchases surveyed in the news generally sit well beyond necessity. In acquiring them, what we are after is rarely solely or even chiefly just material satisfaction; we are also guided by a deeper, often unconscious desire for some form of psychological transformation. We don't only want to own things; we want to be changed through our ownership of them. Once we examine consumer behaviour with sufficient attention and generosity, it becomes clear that we aren't indelibly materialistic at all. What makes our age distinctive is our ambition to try to accomplish a variety of complex psychological goals via the acquisition of material goods. By Alain De Botton Necessity Kinds Purchases Surveyed Generally

I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents. By Alain De Botton Unhappiness Represents Relying Youth Loyal

Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it - a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin's assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And By Alain De Botton Woolf Proust Virginia Reading Silenced

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull. By Alain De Botton Set Labours Makes Prospect Death

Then I noticed a small plate of complimentary marshmallows near Chloe's elbow and it suddenly seemed clear that I didn't love Chloe so much as marshmallow her. What it was about a marshmallow that should suddenly have accorded so perfectly with my feelings towards her I will never know, but the word seemed to capture the essence of my amorous state with an accuracy that the word love, weary with overuse, simply could not aspire to. Even more inexplicably, when I took Chloe's hand and told her that I had something very important to tell her, that I marshmallowed her, she seemed to understand perfectly, answering it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever told her. By Alain De Botton Chloe Suddenly Love Marshmallow Noticed

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher. By Alain De Botton Quo Time Hostility Prevent Questioning

I ... thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends. By Alain De Botton Industries Thought Ends Societies Exceptional

To live in modernityan era contemporaneous with the triumph of the newsis to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory. By Alain De Botton Technology Change Relentless Live Modernityan

Shortly after her older brother died, Chloe (who had just celebrated her eighth birthday) went through a deeply philosophical stage. "I began to question everything," she told me, "I had to figure out what death was, that's enough to turn anyone into a philosopher." Chloe would put her hand over her eyes and tell the family her brother was still alive because she could see him in her mind just as well as she could see them. By Alain De Botton Chloe Shortly Died Birthday Stage

There is a certain tyranny about perfection, a certain exhaustion about it even, something that denies the viewer a role in its creation and that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of an unambiguous statement. True beauty cannot be measured because it is fluctuating, it has only a few angles from which it may be seen, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those areas that will also lend themselves to ugliness. Nothing can be beautiful that does not take a calculated risk with ugliness. By Alain De Botton Ugliness Perfection Statement Tyranny Exhaustion

The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society's most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance. These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal, friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan. By Alain De Botton Marriage Society Arrangements Happiness Benefits

In a more evolved world, one a little more alive to the Greek ideal of love, we would perhaps know to be a bit less clumsy, scared, and aggressive when wanting to point something out, and rather less combative and sensitive when receiving feedback. The concept of education within a relationship would thus lose some of its unnecessarily eerie and negative connotations. We would accept that in responsible hands, both projects - teaching and being taught, calling attention to another's faults, and letting ourselves be critiqued - might By Alain De Botton Greek Scared World Love Clumsy

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect. By Alain De Botton Understanding Love Expression Respect Capacity

Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends. We By Alain De Botton Objects Mimic Material Dimension Require

But calm is precisely what is absent from love's classroom. There is simply too much on the line. The "student" isn't merely a passing responsibility; he or she is a lifelong commitment. Failure will ruin existence. No wonder we may be prone to lose control and deliver cack-handed, hasty speeches which bear no faith in the legitimacy or even the nobility of the act of imparting advice. And no wonder, too, if we end up achieving the very opposite of our goals, because increasing levels of humiliation, anger, and threat have seldom hastened anyone's development. Few of us ever grow more reasonable or more insightful about our own characters for having had our self-esteem taken down a notch, our pride wounded, and our ego subjected to a succession of pointed insults. We simply grow defensive and brittle in the face of suggestions which sound like mean-minded and senseless assaults on our nature rather than caring attempts to address troublesome aspects of our personality. Had By Alain De Botton Classroom Calm Precisely Absent Love

News organizations are coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape and logic can generally only emerge from a perspective of months or even years and that it would hence often be wiser to hear the story in chapters rather than snatched sentences. They are institutionally committed to implying that it is inevitably better to have a shaky and partial grasp of a subject this minute than to wait for a more secure and comprehensive understanding somewhere down the line. By Alain De Botton Sentences Organizations Coy Admitting Present

One ATM could do the work of no fewer than thirty-seven human tellers (and, into the bargain, rarely fell ill). In the United States, about half of all those employed in retail banking - some 500,000 people - lost their jobs between 1980 and 1995, thanks in large part to the invention of these silkily efficient machines. By Alain De Botton Atm Tellers Bargain Rarely Ill

Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be. By Alain De Botton Truth Academic Treasure Inconsequential Masochism

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life. By Alain De Botton Sympathy Sad Ready Offer Actuality

Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically ... At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" ... Our souls do not spell out their troubles. By Alain De Botton Hunch Rationally Deeply Body Works

To assess a nation through its economic data is a little like re-envisaging oneself via the results of a blood test, whereby the traditional markers of personality and character are set aside and it is made clear that one is at base, where it really counts, a creatinine level of 3.2, a lactate dehydrogenase of 927, a leukocyte (per field) of 2 and a C-reactive protein of 2.42. By Alain De Botton Creactive Test Base Counts Leukocyte

Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be. By Alain De Botton Country Seduced Front Door Small

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth. By Alain De Botton Fact Things Achievements Advanced Society

Long before we've had a chance to become truly familiar with our loved one, we may be filled with the curious sense that we know them already. It can seem as though we've met them somewhere before, in a previous life, perhaps, or in our dreams. By Alain De Botton Long Chance Familiar Loved Filled

The news may encourage us to imagine that the roots of a nation's problems have their fundamental origins in criminality at the top and yet, though there is clearly a role for targeting individual rotten apples, there is an equally vital task in directing attention to the colourless yet far larger institutional failures that lie concealed within our political and social arrangements. By Alain De Botton Apples Arrangements Encourage Imagine Roots

Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance. By Alain De Botton Career Guidance Choosing Spouse Great

It may be a sign that two people have stopped loving one another (or at least stopped wishing to make the effort that constitutes ninety per cent of love) when they are no longer able to spin differences into jokes. Humour lined the walls of irritation between our ideals and the reality: behind every joke, there was a warning of difference, of disappointment even, but it was a difference that had been defused - and could therefore be passed over without the need for a pogrom. By Alain De Botton Stopped Love Sign People Loving

I believe that the sight is more important thing that the drawing; and i would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, that teach looking at nature that they may learn to draw. By Alain De Botton Learn Drawing Teach Nature Draw

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them. By Alain De Botton Intimacy Capacity Weird Finding

They therefore have no opportunity to suffer the interval between desire and gratification which the less privileged endure, and which, for all its apparent unpleasantness, has the incalculable benefit of allowing people to know and fall deeply in love with paintings in Dresden, hats, dressing gowns, and someone who isn't free this evening. By Alain De Botton Dresden Hats Endure Unpleasantness Dressing

Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin. By Alain De Botton Opinion Bulletin Modern Democracies Commitment

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain. By Alain De Botton Time Chain Danger Travel Things

East DR Congo Faces Catastrophic Humanitarian Crisis 4,450 By Alain De Botton Crisis Congo Faces Catastrophic Humanitarian

Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself. By Alain De Botton Painful Oneself Unrequited Selfinduced Love

Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule. By Alain De Botton French Reality Ago Franker Kinder

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting. By Alain De Botton Lazy Quoting Option Emotionally

A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to another person. By Alain De Botton Basic Tragic Truth Person Spouse

Rejection hurts so much because we take it as a damning judgement passed not merely on our physical appeal but on our entire selves, and by extension (at this stage we're crying into our pillow, as something by Bach or Leonard Cohen plays on the stereo) on our very right to exist. 2. By Alain De Botton Bach Leonard Cohen Rejection Extension

Interest did not naturally belong to such anecdotes. For the most part, only Chloe and I appreciated them, because of the subsidiary associations we attached to them. Yet these leitmotifs were important because they gave us the feeling that we were far from strangers to one another, that we had lived through things together, and remembered the joint meanings we had derived from them. However slight these leitmotifs were, they acted like cement. The language of intimacy they helped to create was a reminder that (without clearing our way through jungles, slaying dragons, or even sharing apartments) Chloe and I had created something of a world together. By Alain De Botton Interest Anecdotes Chloe Naturally Belong

The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring. By Alain De Botton Boxes Architects Benefit Generous Lay

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life. By Alain De Botton Balance Thing Worklife Life Worth

There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled, or as "normal" as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for. At By Alain De Botton Love Propriety Early Period Measure

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way. By Alain De Botton Corbusier Writer Outstanding Brusque Convincingly

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. By Alain De Botton Artistic Accounts Involve Severe Abbreviations

Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say ... but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence. By Alain De Botton Incomprehensible Offers Unparalleled Protection Courage

An understandable hunger for ... potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, ... immune to the methods of factory farming. By Alain De Botton Understandable Hunger Potential Career Therapists

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves? By Alain De Botton Cynicism Love Spectrum Prone Lie

But is shame really the most useful tool to be employed in the reformation of mankind? Do people grow better through being belittled? Does fear educate? By Alain De Botton Mankind Shame Tool Employed Reformation

WE END UP with the following situation: on the one hand, we have a news agenda dominated by reports of the workings of a highly complicated social science that wrestles with problems of near cosmic scale and incomprehensible difficulty, upon which it periodically delivers pronouncements at once pessimistic and resigned; and on the other hand, we have a host of inchoate, naive, innocent, impassioned but powerful longings that are carefully concealed and mostly go unmentioned for fear of sacrificing claims to decency and adult seriousness. By Alain De Botton Hand Naive Innocent End Situation

Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, to quote Nietzsche's useful phrase, 'the bad odours of religion'. We have grown frightened of the word morality. We bridle at the thought of hearing a sermon. We flee from the idea that art should be uplifting or have an ethical mission. We don't go on pilgrimages. We can't build temples. We have no mechanisms for expressing gratitude. Strangers rarely sing together. We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society. By Alain De Botton Nietzsche Phrase Religion Unfairly Impoverished

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers ... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness ... By Alain De Botton Physics Despair Bitterness Biology Movements

All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the production of a masterpiece. As By Alain De Botton Difficult Met Lives Makes Fulfilled

The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol. By Alain De Botton Close Challenge Lies Knowing Bring

What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation. By Alain De Botton Civilisation Inordinately Rich Things Generation

There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. The way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved (on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be. By Alain De Botton Marxist Moment Love Relationship Hand

Think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it - our life - hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn't happen this time, we won't miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening. By Alain De Botton Life Cataclysm Suddenly Wonderful Threatened

Our innate imbalances are further aggravated by practical demands. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored. Society ends up containing a range of unbalanced groups, each hungering to sate its particular psychological deficiency, forming the backdrop against which our frequently heated conflicts about what is beautiful plays themselves out. By Alain De Botton Demands Innate Imbalances Aggravated Practical

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer 's words, to turn pain into knowledge. By Alain De Botton Schopenhauer Art Words Knowledge Philosophy

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world. By Alain De Botton Montaigne Frontiers Imagination World Travelling

The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves. By Alain De Botton Priorities Truthful Essence Charge Made

If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. By Alain De Botton Understanding Sublime World Unfair Places

In the United States in 1907, a book entitled Three Acres and Liberty seized the imagination of the reading public. The author, Bolton Hall, began by taking for granted the awkwardness of having to work for someone else, and so advised his readers that they could win their freedom by leaving their offices and factories and buying three acres apiece of inexpensive farmland in middle America. This acreage would soon enable them to grow enough food for a family of four and to build a simple but comfortable home, and best of all, relieve them of any need ever again to flatter or negotiate with colleagues and superiors. By Alain De Botton United States Liberty Acres Public

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can't afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world. By Alain De Botton Literature Power Deeply Stands Opposed

To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it. By Alain De Botton Incitement Make Discipline Give Large

I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day- to- day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches. By Alain De Botton Day Optimistic Things General Pessimistic

The defenders of feeling-based marriage venerate emotions for their authenticity only because they avoid looking closely at what actually floats through most people's emotional kaleidoscopes, all the contradictory, sentimental, and hormonal forces that pull us in a hundred often crazed and inconclusive directions.We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time - inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb. A degree of repression is necessary for both the mental health of our species and the adequate functioning of a decently ordered society. We are chaotic chemical propositions. We should feel grateful for, and protected by, the knowledge that our external circumstances are often out of line with what we feel; it is a sign that we are probably on the right course. By Alain De Botton Marriage Inauthentic Sentimental Kaleidoscopes Contradictory

Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner. By Alain De Botton Offer Permanent Occupancy Store Clothes

To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. By Alain De Botton Song Speak Home Relation Building

Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability. By Alain De Botton Failure Philosophy Process Lending Respectability

Sex will never be simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be,It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should. By Alain De Botton Sex Kind Cruelty Transgression Humiliation

Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order - and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface. By Alain De Botton Ages Middle Abundance Bread World

An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the mikveh ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson. By Alain De Botton Ritual Associating Purity Religions Manages

We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it. By Alain De Botton Agree Religions Teach Admire Institutional

Established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are. By Alain De Botton Established Reasoning Muddle Views Frequently

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture. By Alain De Botton Culture Love True Pursuit Qualities

Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered By Alain De Botton Lovers Uncertainty Risk Delivered Kill

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity. By Alain De Botton Reader Reality Reading Book Writer

What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others. By Alain De Botton Thing Kills Big Thousands Tiny

I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it. By Alain De Botton Counts Passionately Success Argument Critically

What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it. By Alain De Botton Struggles Evoked Sound Language Image

Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer - through their exhaustive dependence, egoism, and vulnerability - an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another. The By Alain De Botton Egoism Children Age Offer Dependence

It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart. By Alain De Botton Walmart Religious Doctrine Cnn Accept

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality. By Alain De Botton Structure Reality Heart Frustration Lies

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire. By Alain De Botton Satisfaction Tempted Achievements Possessions Give

Beneath the pleasure generated by the juxtaposition of order and complexity, we can identify the subsidiary architectural virtue of balance. Beauty is a likely outcome whenever architects skilfully mediate between any number of oppositions, including the old and the new, the natural and the man-made, the luxurious and the modest, and the masculine and the feminine. By Alain De Botton Beneath Complexity Balance Pleasure Generated

But seriously, if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they'd probably say they didn't. Yet that's not necessarily what they truly think. It's just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don't until they're allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never get the chance. By Alain De Botton Asked Believed Love People Necessarily

Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate. By Alain De Botton Eroticism Intimate Seemingly Manifest Intersection

...a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment... because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time. By Alain De Botton Mind Manifestations Gazing Distillation Sporadic

Pronounce a lover 'perfect' can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us. By Alain De Botton Perfect Pronounce Lover Sign Failed

Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality. Knowing that what we now love may in the future, for reasons beyond our current understanding, appear absurd is as hard to bear in the context of a piece of furniture in a shop as it is in the context of a prospective spouse at an altar. By Alain De Botton Precedent Dead Forces Suppose Generations

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to. By Alain De Botton Booksellers Lonely Valuable Destination Numbers

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test. By Alain De Botton Love Weak Loves Strength Weakness

I've had my successes and failures. I know many academics in my field loathe me. I've come to loathe them back, as it seems only polite to do so. But at heart it's absurd; we should band together against the big common enemies. By Alain De Botton Failures Successes Loathe Back Academics

Workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues. By Alain De Botton Medea Workplace Relations Office Cheerfulness

How do the stems connect to the roots?' 'Where is the mist coming from?' 'Why does one tree seem darker than another?' These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching. By Alain De Botton Roots Stems Connect Mist Coming

If love is to be defined as a genuine concern for the well-being of another person, then it must surely be deemed compatible with granting permission for an often harassed and rather browbeaten husband to step off the elevator on the eighteenth floor in order to enjoy ten minutes of rejuvenating cunnilingus with a near stranger. By Alain De Botton Person Stranger Love Defined Genuine

Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who are worried about imposing their views on others. By Alain De Botton Public Life Debased Nice People

After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come. By Alain De Botton History Age Man Strive Packed

We are about to understand, but have not yet understood. This moment is important because it generally does not lie up to its promise. We abandon the process of reflection. Not much of a decision about the personal meaning of love, justice or success is achieved, and we move on to something else. Looking at Twombly's painting assists us in a crucial thought: 'The part of me that wonders about important questions and then gets confused has not had enough recognition By Alain De Botton Understand Understood Important Promise Twombly

The word "snobbery" came into use for the first time in England during 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) , or "s.nob", next to the names of the ordinary students on examinations lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers. In the word's earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equations between social rank and human worth By Alain De Botton England Snobbery Word Time High

Until such time as one has put to oneself a certain number of questions about an author, and has answered them, be it only to oneself alone and under one's breath, one cannot be sure of having grasped him completely, even though the questions may seem quite foreign to the nature of his writings: What were his religious ideas? How did the spectacle of nature affect him? How did he behave in the matter of women, of money? Was he rich, poor; what was his diet, his daily routine? What was his vice or his weakness? None of the answers to these questions is irrelevant. Even so, the answers tend to be surprising. However brilliant, however wise the work, it seems that the lives of artists can be relied upon to exhibit an extraordinary, incongruous range of turmoil, misery, and stupidity. By Alain De Botton Oneself Nature Author Breath Completely

Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought. The views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or a plane, moving quickly enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects. They offer us brief, inspiring glimpses into private domains, letting us see a woman at the precise moment when she takes a cup from a shelf in her kitchen, then carrying us on to a patio where a man is sleeping and then to a park where a child is catching a ball thrown by a figure we cannot see. By Alain De Botton Transport Thought Modes Train Aid

Looking at a photograph by Helen Levitt of four boys in a New York street, we are likely to find ourselves longing to comfort the grim-faced, stoic young man in the corner, whose mother perhaps only half an hour ago did up the many buttons of his handsome coat, and whose distressed expression evokes a pure form of agony. But how very different the same scene would have looked from just a metre away and another viewpoint. To the boy at the far right, what appears to matter most is a chance to take a closer look at his friend's toy. He has already lost any interest in the overdressed crybaby by the wall, whom he and his classmates have just slapped hard for a bit of fun, on this day as on most others. By Alain De Botton Helen Levitt York Street Grimfaced

If the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody. By Alain De Botton Rosy Bloody Equally Beginnings Love

But if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends are often equally bloody. We're familiar with political love that ends in tyranny, where a ruler's firm conviction that he has the true interests of his nation at heart ends up lending him the confidence to murder without qualms (and 'for their own good') all who disagree with him. Romantic lovers are similarly inclined to vent their frustration on dissenters and heretics. By Alain De Botton Equally Ends Rosy Bloody Love

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort. By Alain De Botton Ordinary Life Comfort Desire High

It's almost a blessing when we meet people who naturally want to do the sort of things that are in high demand in society. What a gift to do that, as opposed to other people who would say, 'I want to be a novelist but actually I have to be an accountant.' By Alain De Botton People Society Blessing Meet Naturally

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among. By Alain De Botton Attentions Matter Afflicted Congenital Uncertainty

Q: Did he think that love could last forever? A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn't lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around. By Alain De Botton Forever Love Limits Eternity Lie

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are. By Alain De Botton Necessarily Home Encounter True Life

After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuitedlong before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firmswhat they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling. By Alain De Botton Carol Symons Left Couch Counselor

The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left ... having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings. By Alain De Botton Age Deficiencies Universe Prescientific Offered

Therefore, in the mature account of love, we should never fall at first glance. We should reserve our leap until we have completed a clear-eyed investigation of the depths and nature of the waters. Only after we have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other. By Alain De Botton Glance Mature Account Fall Love

There is not much talk about the clouds that are visible up here. No one seems to think it remarkable that somewhere above an ocean we are flying past a vast white candy-floss island that would have made a perfect seat for an angel or even God himself in a painting by Piero della Francesca. In the cabin, no one stands up to announce with requisite emphasis that if we look out the window, we will see that we are flying over a cloud, a matter that would have detained Leonardo and Poussin, Claude and Constable. By Alain De Botton Talk Visible Flying Francesca God

[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who had actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation.Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. 'Culture' is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to. By Alain De Botton Japanese Beauty Donald Keene Literature

We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. By Alain De Botton Existing Understand Confirmed Numbness Exist

It is hopewith regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planetthat is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces. By Alain De Botton Careers Lives Children Politicians Hopewith

Solitary though we may have become, we haven't of course given up all hope of forming relationships. In the lonely canyons of the modern city, there is no more honoured emotion than love. However, this is not the love of which religions speak, not the expansive, universal brotherhood of mankind; it is a more jealous, restricted and ultimately meaner variety. It is a romantic love which sends us on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a life-long and complete communion, one person in particular who will spare us any need for people in general. By Alain De Botton Solitary Relationships Love Forming Hope

The longing provoked by the brochure was an example , at once touching and pathetic, of how projects (and even whole lives) might be influenced by the simplest and most unexamined images of happiness; of how a lengthy and ruinously expensive journey might be set in motion by nothing more than the sigh of a photograph of a palm tree gently inclining in a tropical breeze. I resolved to travel to the island of Barbados. By Alain De Botton Pathetic Projects Lives Happiness Breeze

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. By Alain De Botton Peculiarities Sex Efforts Clean Simple

Our "ego" or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect. By Alain De Botton Ego Balloon Forever Inflated Neglect

Yet whatever her enthusiasm for independence, with time Chloe nevertheless began leaving things behind. Not toothbrushes or pairs of shoes, but pieces of herself. It began with language, with Chloe leaving me her way of saying not ever instead of never, and of stressing the be of before, or of saying take care before hanging up the telephone. She in turn acquired use of my perfect and if you really think so. Habits began to leak between us: I acquired Chloe's need for total darkness in the bedroom, she followed my way of folding the newspaper, I took to wandering in circles around the sofa to think a problem through, she acquired a taste carpet. By Alain De Botton Chloe Began Independence Acquired Leaving

We have almost all had the experience of gazing at the full moon. But those of us who are neither astronomers nor astronauts are unlikely to have scheduled moongazing appointments. For Zen Buddhists in Japan, however, every year, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the traditional Japanese lunisolar calendar, followers gather at nightfall around specially constructed cone-shaped viewing platforms, where for several hours prayers are read aloud which use the moon as a springboard for reflections on Zen ideas of impermanence, a ritual known as tsukimi. Candles are lit and white rice dumplings (tsukimi dango) are prepared and shared out among strangers in an atmosphere at once companionable and serene, a feeling thereby supported by a ceremony, by architecture, by good company and by food. By Alain De Botton Zen Experience Gazing Full Moon

It seemed impossible, from within love at least, that this could have been anything but fate. It would have taken a steady mind to contemplate without superstition the enormous probability of a meeting that had turned out to alter our lives. Someone at (30,000 feet) must have been pulling strings in the sky. By Alain De Botton Impossible Fate Love Feet Lives

Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again, but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time; not when they have every opportunity to run away, but when they have exchanged solemn vows promising to hold us, and be held captive by us, for life. Our By Alain De Botton Love Time Life Stories Begin

The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own. By Alain De Botton Life Limited Depiction Emotions People

To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem. By Alain De Botton Loved Realize Share Lie Heart

If engineering cannot tell us what our houses should look like, nor in a pluralistic and non-deferential world can precedent or tradition, we must be free to pursue all stylistic options. We should acknowledge that the question of what is beautiful is both impossible to elucidate and shameful and even undemocratic to mention. By Alain De Botton Tradition Options Engineering Houses Pluralistic

Because fulfillment is an illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counseled, 'in a small fireproof room' - advice that now struck Nietzsche as both timid and untrue, a perverse attempt to dwell, as he was to put it pejoratively several years later, 'hidden in forests like shy deer.' Fulfillment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good. By Alain De Botton Schopenhauer Nietzsche Avoiding Pain Illusion

Year-end financial statements ... express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes. By Alain De Botton Yearend Statements Financial Express End

Patron Saint of Failures St Birgitta of Sweden. By Alain De Botton Sweden Saint Failures Birgitta Patron

According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one. By Alain De Botton View Love Direction Place Goal

A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate. Rabih By Alain De Botton Proposal Meeting Marriage Initial Rabih

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones. By Alain De Botton Uncertainty End People Married Emotional

Beneath the kiss itself, it is its meaning that interests us - which is why the desire to kiss someone can be decisively reduced (as it may need be, for instance, when two lovers are already married to other people) by a declaration of that desire - a confession which may in itself be so erotic as to render the actual kiss superfluous. By Alain De Botton Kiss Desire Beneath Reduced Instance

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other. By Alain De Botton London Restaurants Concerts Lectures City

Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being dumbstruck by the Bombardier trains that progress driverlessly between satellites or by the General Electric GE90 engines that hang lightly off the composite wings of a Boeing 777 bound for Seoul. And yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness. By Alain De Botton Standing Beauty Awe Admiration Costly

Humboldt's early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: '1) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants, minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5)The acquaintance with new species of the human race their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.' What may be accomplished in a lifetimeand seldom or never is. By Alain De Botton Humboldt Schwarzenberg Lifetime Discovery Biographer

A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. "Beauty is the promise of happiness," he wrote, pointing to the way Chloe's face alluded to qualities I identified with a good life: there was humor in her nose, her freckles spoke of innocence, and her teeth suggested a casual, cheeky disregard for convention. By Alain De Botton Stendhal Chloe Beauty Definition Accurately

With his Policraticus (1159), John of Salisbury had become the most famous Christian writer to compare society to a human body and to use that analogy to justify a system of natural inequality. In Salisbury's formulation, every element in the state had an anatomical counterpart: the ruler was the head, the parliament was the heart, the court was the sides, officials and judges were the eyes, ears and tongue, the treasury was the belly and intestines, the army was the hands and the peasantry and labouring classes were the feet. By Alain De Botton Salisbury Policraticus John Christian Inequality

I did not live Chloe for her body, I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise By Alain De Botton Chloe Body Promise Live Loved

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes. By Alain De Botton Kiss Ungrateful Extremes Attractive Feel

Voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect and the eyes, [gives] us only imprecise facsimiles of the past which no more resemble it than pictures by bad painters resemble the spring. ... So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it, but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated, and similarly we think we no longer love the dead, because we don't remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears. A By Alain De Botton Memory Resemble Voluntary Eyes Spring

In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well. By Alain De Botton Britain Competition Live Run Problems

What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along. By Alain De Botton Make Success Ideas Argue Give

We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are. By Alain De Botton Company Importantly Pick Friends Kind

Memory is ... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection. By Alain De Botton Memory Similar Anticipation Selection Instrument

It was a reminder that the labeling of others is usually a silent process. Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mold they have assigned us. 12. A By Alain De Botton Process Reminder Labeling Silent Roles

Our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather. By Alain De Botton Allergies Coughs Social Gaffes Betrayals

Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves. By Alain De Botton Caged Careers Chosen Worldly 1822

Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, "Don't you worry about being called names?" retorted, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me? By Alain De Botton Socrates Retorted Marketplace Asked Passerby

In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, ... and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one. By Alain De Botton French Reality Ago Franker Kinder

Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate. By Alain De Botton Marriage Generous Hopeful Infinitely Binding

A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. In its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor's complexity and sadness - and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love. By Alain De Botton Precedent Wellloved Child Set Challenging

The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends By Alain De Botton Projects Years Pursuit Personal Happiness

The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated - I was left alone with my desire, defenseless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reason? I had only the usual paltry, insufficient excuse: Because I love you . . By Alain De Botton Defenseless Unreciprocated Desire Law Shockingly

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustionand, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas. By Alain De Botton Guide Entrenched Behaviour Babies Small

Mary in Christianity, Isis in ancient Egypt, Demeter in Greece, Venus in Rome and Guan Yin in China have all functioned as conduits to recollections of early tenderness. Their statues often stand in darkened, womb-like spaces, their faces are compassionate and supportive, they enable us to sit, talk and cry with them. The similarities between them are too great to be coincidental. We are dealing here with figures that have evolved not out of shared cultural origins but in response to the universal needs of the human psyche. By Alain De Botton Christianity Isis Egypt Demeter Greece

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh. By Alain De Botton Jewish English Sport School Foreign

We were bothered by sex because it is a fundamentally disruptive, overwhelming and demented force, strongly at odds with the majority of our ambitions and all but incapable of being discreetly integrated within civilized society. By Alain De Botton Disruptive Overwhelming Force Strongly Society

Was my sense of being in love not just the result of living in a particular cultural epoch? Was it not society, rather than any authentic urge, that was motivating me to pride myself on romantic love? In previous cultures and ages, would I not have been taught to ignore my feelings for Chloe in the way I was now taught to ignore (more or less) the impulse to wear stockings or to respond to insult with a challenge to a duel? "Some By Alain De Botton Love Epoch Sense Result Living

But I could I tell her so in a way that would suggest the distinctive nature of my attraction? Words like "love" or "devotion" or "infatuation" we're exhausted by the weight of successive love stories, but the layers imposed on them through the uses of others. By Alain De Botton Attraction Suggest Distinctive Nature Love

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities. By Alain De Botton Screens Announced Fonts Skies Airport

It isn't surprising if, as adults, when we first start to form relationships, we should devotedly go off in search of someone who can give us the all-encompassing, selfless love that we may once have known in childhood. Nor would it be surprising if we were to feel frustrated and in the end extremely bitter at how difficult it seems to be to find; at how seldom people understand what we need or care to help us properly. By Alain De Botton Surprising Adults Relationships Allencompassing Selfless

A thought provoking number of the world's most intelligent people have disdained any interest in decoration and design, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead. By Alain De Botton Design Equating Thought Provoking Number

These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world. By Alain De Botton Activity Inventors Elevating Formulation Entrepreneurial

Unfortunately for our esteem, societies of the West are not known for their conduciveness to the surrender of pretensions, to the acceptance of age or fat, let alone poverty and obscurity. By Alain De Botton West Esteem Societies Pretensions Fat

One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other - not with one person wanting a fling and the other real love ... By Alain De Botton Expectations Ready Love Relationships Equal

At the heart of sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worth of one. We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love. By Alain De Botton Intense Heart Lies Confusing Mixture

For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we knowwithout ever having constructed one ourselvesthat a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209) By Alain De Botton Elegant Won Predicament Deem Work

We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery. By Alain De Botton Buildings Misery Sad Home Blame

He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that. By Alain De Botton Life Stayed Feared Leaving Ruin

Hopper invites us to feel empathy with the woman in her isolation. She seems dignified and generous, only perhaps a little too trusting, a little naive - as if she has knocked against a hard corner of the world. Hopper puts us on her side, the side of the outsider against the insiders. The figures in Hopper's art are not opponents of home per se; it is simply that in a variety of undefined ways, home appears to have betrayed them, forcing them out into the night or onto the road. By Alain De Botton Hopper Isolation Invites Feel Empathy

We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn't a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven't allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly and that we are invested enough to care. By Alain De Botton Acceptance Requirement Weak Curse Limited

Must being in love always mean being in pain? By Alain De Botton Pain Love

However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative. By Alain De Botton Work Corporations Internal Consisting Mentalities

We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it ... Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it." That's what all religions tell us: "Get on your knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." Otherwise our minds are like sieves. By Alain De Botton Nonsense Times Day Tend Modern

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, "Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?" By Alain De Botton Lucretius Death Works Find Worry

The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea on the hull of a yacht, or the contrast between the color of a jockey's coat and his face. By Alain De Botton Found Encountered Details Dress Yacht

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed. By Alain De Botton Read Books Sensitized Glasses Deeper

A few centuries from now, the level of self-knowledge that our own age judges necessary to get married might be thought puzzling, if not outright barbaric. By then, a standard, wholly non-judgemental line of enquiry (appropriate even on a first date), to which everyone would be expected to have a tolerant, good-natured and non-defensive answer, would simply be: 'So in what ways are you mad?' Kirsten By Alain De Botton Puzzling Barbaric Centuries Level Selfknowledge

For the dueller, what other people think of him will be the only factor in settling what he may think of himself. He cannot continue to be acceptable in his own eyes when those around him find him evil or dishonourable, a coward or a failure, a fool or an effeminate. So dependent is his self-image on the views of others that he would prefer to die by a bullet or stab wound than allow unfavourable ideas about him to remain lodged in the public mind. By Alain De Botton Dueller People Factor Settling Dishonourable

Take the case of prostitutes, a group more or less available every night. As a young man, Proust had been a compulsive masturbator, so compulsive that his father had urged him to go to a brothel, to take his mind off what the nineteenth century considered to be a highly dangerous pastime. In a candid letter to his grandfather, sixteen-year-old Marcel described how the visit had gone: I so badly needed to see a woman in order to stop my bad habits of masturbating that papa gave me 10 francs to go to the brothel. But, 1st in my excitement, I broke the chamber pot, 3 francs, 2nd in this same excitement, I wasn't able to have sex. So now I'm back to square one, constantly waiting for another 10 francs to empty myself and for 3 more francs for that pot. By Alain De Botton Francs Prostitutes Night Brothel Case

Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced. By Alain De Botton Defects Weaknesses Type Produced Endeavours

Jesus sleeping in his mother's arms subliminally reinforce his counsel that we should learn to regard all our fellow human beings as if they were children. By Alain De Botton Jesus Children Sleeping Mother Arms

Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one. By Alain De Botton Worry Anxiety Status Lives Respect

The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is. By Alain De Botton Truth Thing Lies Disprove Human

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not. By Alain De Botton Periods Responses Rhythm Conversation Makes

However, the immediacy with which aesthetic judgments arise should not fool us into assuming that their origins are entirely natural or their verdicts unalterable. By Alain De Botton Unalterable Immediacy Aesthetic Judgments Arise

He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocritysuggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction. By Alain De Botton Dissatisfaction Marked Relentless Ability Find

Writing isn't a career choice. It's self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off. By Alain De Botton Writing Choice Career Selfmedication Time

Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age. They force us to fart and burp, and to abandon sensible plans in order to lie in bed with people, sweating and letting out intense sounds reminiscent of coyotes calling out to one another across the barren wastes of the American deserts. Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms. By Alain De Botton Ache Sag Pulse Smell Throb

Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like. By Alain De Botton Bach God Music Shows Love

We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us? By Alain De Botton Intelligent Stupid Beautiful Ugly Dull

Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent NORMALITY of the loved one By Alain De Botton Normality Love Reveals Insanity Refusal

Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own "tone" ... . I don't mean to say that I like original writers who write badly. I prefer - and perhaps it's a weakness - those who write well. But they begin to write well only on condition that they're original, that they create their own language. Correctness, perfection of style do exist, but on the other side of originality, after having gone through all the faults, not this side. Correctness this side - "discreet emotion," "smiling good nature," "most abominable of all years" - doesn't exist. The only way to defend language is to attack it, yes, yes, Madame Straus! By Alain De Botton Obliged Tone Create Write Language

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living. By Alain De Botton Perfect Living Learnt Stop Fantasising

In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride - or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation - takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we fare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert - all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition. By Alain De Botton Augustine Latin Moments Pride Superbia

A single idea recurs throughout his work: that we best endure those frustrations which we have prepared ourselves for and understand and are hurt most by those we least expected and cannot fathom. Philosophy must reconcile us to the true dimensions of reality, and so spare us, if not frustration itself, then at least its panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions. By Alain De Botton Work Fathom Single Idea Recurs

If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us, it is because we fashion our lives according to their example, accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others mention of themselves. By Alain De Botton Accepting Accord Importance Kind Portraits

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are. By Alain De Botton Politics Difficult Generally People Task

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out. By Alain De Botton Bad Art Defined Series Choices

Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar. By Alain De Botton Weakness Sadness Fear Hard Roar

There is no necessary connection between the concepts of home and of prettiness; what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to. By Alain De Botton Home Prettiness Ignores Connection Concepts

What we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness By Alain De Botton Ignores Architecture Happiness Call Home

In Flaubert's eyes, that only entirely illiterate and uneducated Frenchmen now stood a chance of being able to think properly: By Alain De Botton Flaubert Frenchmen Eyes Properly Illiterate

The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover's paranoia and the creation of a secret police). By Alain De Botton Relationships Unity Omnipotence Police Beginning

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that. By Alain De Botton Nuts Arrogance Analysing Relationship Reasons

Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours. By Alain De Botton Insomnia Hours Mind Revenge Tricky

Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs. By Alain De Botton Amiss Hand Computer Invented Feelings

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed. By Alain De Botton Marriage Believed Interested Modern Suggestion

There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them. By Alain De Botton Danger Developing Blanket Distaste Modern

Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back. By Alain De Botton Back Snappy Symptom Argument Forgot

There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies. By Alain De Botton Subway Species Carriage Improbably Silence

At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident. We can start to break free from this torture by recognizing that the evenings that don't work out are really just a minor species of bad luck. The By Alain De Botton Judgement Accident Heart Pain Created

Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming. But it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust. By Alain De Botton Sublime Places Gently Move Acknowledge

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same. By Alain De Botton Disease Love Incurable Suffering Permanent

The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it - just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her. By Alain De Botton Quickest Stop Noticing Buy Appreciating

We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly and make everything better. It sounds 'romantic'; yet it is a blueprint for disaster. By Alain De Botton Adulthood Idea Love Grown Indulged

He will conclude that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions; and that for his relationships to work he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm. By Alain De Botton Ambitions Place Love Conclude Endure

When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us By Alain De Botton Hurt Suspect Targets

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds. By Alain De Botton Perspective Give Crystalline Hyderabad Tunis

For most of their relationship, Eric avoided paying his due because he knew Alice would pay when he didn't. If he paid only 10 units, she would come up with the other 30. If he didn't feel like driving over to her house then she would come to his. if he didn't wish to break a deadlock after an argument, he could count on her to play the mediator. But he miscalculated just how far he could push Alice. her share of the 40x began to slowly decline, leaven him to make up the shortfall. Only small amounts were at first involved, but they suffered remorseless inflation until the full weight of the relationship came to descend on this delicate shoulders. Alice had in a myriad of ways imply ceased to care, and Eric realized that unless he continued to pump around 30x into the situation, Alice and he would inevitably collide and break up. By Alain De Botton Alice Eric Avoided Paying Due

It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled. By Alain De Botton Beautiful Architecture Word Alludes Level

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives. By Alain De Botton Meaningful Lives Real Issue Baking

The only problem with unrestricted choice, however, is that it tends not to lie so far from outright chaos. By Alain De Botton Choice Chaos Problem Unrestricted Lie

Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available. By Alain De Botton Blind Section Impatience Equally Evident

Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things. Maturity is the possession of coping skills: we can take in our stride things that previously would have knocked us off course. We are less fragile, less easily shocked and hence more capable of engaging with situations as they really are By Alain De Botton Growth Things Occurs Discover Remain

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without. By Alain De Botton Turn Happiness Millions People Live

There are two ways to make people richer, reasoned Rousseau: to give them more money or to restrain their desires. By Alain De Botton Rousseau Richer Reasoned Desires Make

Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department. By Alain De Botton Axtell Jane Human Resources Responsible

By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer's theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject. By Alain De Botton Schopenhauer Love Inevitable Key Species

It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly. By Alain De Botton Marriage Badly Making Individual Interest

For thousands of years, it had been natureand its supposed creatorthat had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs ... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves. By Alain De Botton Feeling Years Thousands Natureand Supposed

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me? By Alain De Botton Kind Good Book Leave Author

Once we are involved in a relationship, there is no longer any such thing as a minor detail. By Alain De Botton Relationship Detail Involved Longer Thing

If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes. By Alain De Botton Lives Alludes Search Happiness Underlying

history tells us of the case of a man living under the peculiar delusion that he was a fried egg. Quite how or when this idea had entered his head, no one knew, but he now refused to sit down anywhere for fear that he would 'break himself' and 'spill the yolk'. His doctors tried sedatives and other drugs to appease his fears, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, one of them made the effort to enter the mind of the deluded patient and suggested that he should carry a piece of toast with him at all times, which he could place on any chair he wished to sit on, and thereby protect himself from breaking his yolk. From then on, the deluded man was never seen without a piece of toast handy, and was able to continue a more or less normal existence. By Alain De Botton History Egg Case Living Peculiar

Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail. By Alain De Botton Failure Fail

Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder? By Alain De Botton Partially Products Undermining Manufacturer Ability

Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value. By Alain De Botton Interest Objects Began Potential Released

Because I have this thing about birthdays--they always remind me of death and forced jollity. By Alain De Botton Birthdays Jollity Thing Remind Death

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person. By Alain De Botton Unhappy Person Divorce Necessarily Neatly

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work. By Alain De Botton Writing Nonfiction Conscious Stretch Boundaries

To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap By Alain De Botton Patiently Tap Design Forcing Unlearn

As the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered. By Alain De Botton Naturally Shifting Altered Status Determinants

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us. By Alain De Botton Seek Fortune Greater Reason Secure

There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there. By Alain De Botton Place Selections Acute Define Result

All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him. By Alain De Botton Humiliation Tours Filled People Waiting

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe. By Alain De Botton Pleasurable Intoxicating Man Postponed Encounter

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did. By Alain De Botton Media Insists Taking Closer Truth

Then, in a further challenge to reality and because of the way she felt towards them, Chloe would (with the grin of a six-year-old child facing the power of its hostile impulses) tell her parents she could kill them by shutting her eyes and never thinking of them again - a plan which no doubt elicit a profoundly unphilosophical response from the parents. By Alain De Botton Chloe Parents Child Impulses Challenge

The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams. By Alain De Botton Life Longing Destiny Stronger Romantic

Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing. By Alain De Botton Artistic Night Inspiring Leaving Longing

We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day. By Alain De Botton Achieve Failures Relationships Sorrows Unable

We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues. By Alain De Botton Personally Generally Deficient Style Conclude

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion. By Alain De Botton World Art Devotion Secularising Replaced

Books should be full of stuff you could never say to people in public. By Alain De Botton Books Public Full Stuff People

peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life. Rabih By Alain De Botton Peculiar Sad Love Deserve Place

The death of literature had been exaggerated. Whereas on dating websites, those who like books are usually bracketed into a single category, the broad selections on offer at WH Smith spoke to the diversity of individuals' motives for reading. If there was a conclusion to be drawn from the number of bloodstained covers, however, it was that there was a powerful desire, in a wide cross-section of airline passengers, to be terrified. By Alain De Botton Exaggerated Death Literature Smith Websites

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own. By Alain De Botton Good Books Put Finger Emotions

The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake. By Alain De Botton Circumstances Making Mistake Degree Sympathy

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days. By Alain De Botton Daffodils Sunsets Days Bashed Bit

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease. By Alain De Botton Capable Disease Intelligent Awareness Insanity

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need - but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need - within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves. By Alain De Botton Depend Surroundings Obliquely Embody Moods

Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less. By Alain De Botton Fish Smaller Struggling Bigger Concentrate

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others. By Alain De Botton Language Ordinary Dictionarydefined Discourse Familiar

I am not a foodie, thank goodness. I will eat pretty much anything. A lot of my friends are getting incredibly fussy about food and I see it as a bit of an affliction. By Alain De Botton Foodie Goodness Affliction Eat Pretty

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope. By Alain De Botton Coming Despair Suggests Total Control

We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology . . . But when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day By Alain De Botton Immigration Oncology Complexity Resolution Life

Never having been betrayed sets up poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal people requires us to suffer through some properly innoculative episodes, in which we feel for a time limitlessly panicked, violated and on the edge of collapse. Only then can the injunction not to betray our spouses evolve from a bland bromide into a permanently vivid moral imperative. By Alain De Botton Faithful Betrayed Sets Poor Preconditions

It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soulmate. We needn't have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn't come into it. What matters instead is intuition: a spontaneous feeling that seems all the more accurate and worthy of respect because it bypasses the normal processes of reason. By Alain De Botton Fast Soulmate Certainty Human Objective

Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that can we date to be extravagantly and boundlessly unreasonable. By Alain De Botton Stranger Unreasonable Polite Presence Lover

There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane's ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us. P. 38-39 By Alain De Botton Takeoff Transformation Psychological Pleasure Swiftness

Thunderstorms were what death, and dramatic events, generally should be like, but usually were not; the idea that our life's dramas rarely look as dramatic as they are. Our most cataclysmic moments are typically free of gravitas, of necessary thunder; a person dies, but instead of the sky darkening and lightning striking, the sun continues to shine and the birds to sing. By Alain De Botton Dramatic Thunderstorms Death Events Generally

He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with. By Alain De Botton Wordsworth Invited Eyes Perspective Readers

No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment. By Alain De Botton Great Anxiety Experience Immediately Attempt

Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment. By Alain De Botton Logically Pornographers Office Nunnery Singularly

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble. By Alain De Botton Resemble Closely Unexpectedly Difficult Reading

One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love. By Alain De Botton Love Read Ascribing Heroine Traits

It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should. By Alain De Botton Unexpected Disasters Modern Age Unparalleled

So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the phone doesn't ring, he isn't asked out, nothing new happens. For must of his adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe, only to recognize, at last, that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly, through cowardly inaction. By Alain De Botton Failure Silence Ring Catastrophe Recognize

Living is something of an emergency anyway, but our struggles must usually be strenuously concealed. Our anxieties churn away within us, yet on the outside we must smile and deliver upbeat answers to enquiries about how we're doing. By Alain De Botton Living Concealed Emergency Struggles Strenuously

We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so ... We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition. By Alain De Botton Communicate Feel Reach Nearest Phrase

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species. By Alain De Botton Love Fall Selfknowledge Involves Triumph

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships. By Alain De Botton Explored Hopes Ambitious Driven Sorely

Confident that cast-iron walls separate our nature and situation from theirs, comfortable in the well-broken-in saddle of our high horse, we have exchanged our capacity to be tolerant for detachment and derision.It is the tragedian's task, then, to force us to confront an almost unbearable truth: every folly or myopia of which any human being in history has been guilty may be traced back to some aspect of our collective nature. Because we each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right - or rather the most horribly wrong - conditions. By Alain De Botton Nature Confident Comfortable Saddle Horse

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key - a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they've been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place. The By Alain De Botton Good Communicators Listeners Rare Important

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness. By Alain De Botton Uncertain Distraction Exhaustion Fear Differences

By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell, By Alain De Botton Orwell George Forty Deserve Wrote

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what book he could give the Soviets to teach them about the advantages of American society, he pointed to the Sears catalogue. By Alain De Botton Franklin Roosevelt Soviets American Sears

A flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize the times when the news no longer has anything original or important to teach us; periods when we should refuse imaginative connection with strangers, when we must leave the business of governing, triumphing, failing, creating or killing to others, in the knowledge that we have our own objectives to honour in the brief time still allotted to us. By Alain De Botton Triumphing Failing Periods Strangers Governing

According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually. By Alain De Botton Montaigne Bodies Normality Sexually Oppressive

But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges. By Alain De Botton Wishes Fantasies Thing Make Multiple

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be. By Alain De Botton Things Atheist Nonbelievers Lots Religions

The system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: the freedom not to have to take the achievements of quite so many people in society as reference points - and so find themselves severely wanting in status and importance as a result. By Alain De Botton John Fortescue Salisbury Freedom Points

How seldom we notice rooftops; how easily our eyes are drawn to the more flamboyant attractions of a Roman temple or Renaissance church. By Alain De Botton Roman Renaissance Rooftops Church Seldom

A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception. By Alain De Botton Exception Lump Rises Throat Sight

We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments. By Alain De Botton God Continue Exhortations Sympathetic Hand

Our nation isn't just a severed hand, a mutilated grandmother, three dead girls in a basement, embarrassment for a minister, trillions of debt, a double suicide at the railway station and a fatal five-car crash by the coast. By Alain De Botton Hand Grandmother Basement Embarrassment Minister

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury. By Alain De Botton Luxury Materialistic View Happiness Age

My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a specific person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable. By Alain De Botton Destiny Love Person Chloe Mistake

We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time - inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb. By Alain De Botton Inauthentic Time Children Poison Spouse

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends. By Alain De Botton Envy Group Feel Members Reference

Delusions are not harmful in themselves, they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained. By Alain De Botton Delusions Sustained Harmful Hurt Believing

Our weak understanding of our needs is aggravated by what Epicurus termed 'idle opinions' of those around us, which do not reflect the natural hierarchy of our needs, emphasizing luxury and riches, seldom friendship, freedom and thought. The prevalence of idle opinion is no coincidence. It is in the interest of commercial enterprises to slew the hierarchy of our needs, to promote a material vision of good and downplay an unsaleable one. By Alain De Botton Epicurus Termed Emphasizing Riches Seldom

Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'. By Alain De Botton Thinking Chair Gazing Blankly Disrespect

We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge. By Alain De Botton Dark Endeavour Knowledge Periods Digging

Despite their claims to a purely scientific and reasoned approach, the relationship of Modernist architects to their work remained at base a romantic one; they looked to architecture to support a way of life that appealed to them. Their domestic buildings were conceived as stage sets for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence. By Alain De Botton Modernist Approach Claims Purely Scientific

It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world. By Alain De Botton Soulless Ugly Horrifying Immaculate World

How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read. By Alain De Botton Read Buy Books Time

The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although to the more imaginative at least a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves. By Alain De Botton Indifference Carton Cable Mysterious Study

Even if the whole of the man-made world could, through relentless effort and sacrifice, be modelled to rival St Mark's Square, even if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotonda or the Glass House, we would still often be in a bad mood. 7. By Alain De Botton Square House Mark Villa Rotonda

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture - and, in the process, we don't allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. By Alain De Botton Culture Process Minds Continuously Challenged

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone. By Alain De Botton Relationships Smartphone Challenge Modern Prove

The only difference between the end of love and the end of life being that at least in the latter, we are granted that the comforting thought that we will not feel anything after death. No such comfort for the lover, who knows that the end of the relationship will not necessarily be the end of love, and almost certainly no the end of life. By Alain De Botton End Love Life Death Difference

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. By Alain De Botton Good Book Makes Reading Moment

There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel's load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love's burden. By Alain De Botton Arabic Soul